With the exception of a few photographers such as Joey L and Sam Hurd who are among the first to have popped into my head, I would say it’s often rare for photographers to share more of a backstory to the work they create aside from a generic synoptic outline of what they photographed and who it was for. There are those who are of the ilk that believe your photograph should provide all the details and enlightenment you may need and while that may be true, I’m also a firm believer in that regardless of how trivial you may think the details of a shoot were, I guarantee you that sharing this information will create an opportunity for an asynchronous connection between you and a someone else out there.

When you write about your experiences, you’re essentially letting people know that despite how it may seem, you honestly don’t have everything figured out. We’re all in the same boat and I like to think this type of information is providing hope and ambition to those who are trying to conquer the same fears we’re often afflicted with as a photographer or a creative in general. One of my personal objectives for 2014 since I failed to attain the previous year was to start taking on freelance work and I’ve recently have had the ongoing opportunity to do so all by happy accident.

Bushwick, Brooklyn

Astoria, Queens

Long Island City, Queens

Since having had a few of my photographs published on TimeOut New York, the photo editor took notice of my affinity for capturing street portraits of complete strangers and to make a long story short, she basically stated “Why not get paid for it?” and here I am a few weeks in working with them on an ongoing photo series entitled City Stories.

Jackson Heights, Queens

Chinatown, New York

Jackson Heights, Queens

I’ve had the fortune of collaboration with several writers as we’ve venture out together to a neighborhood of the publication’s choosing and my responsibility is to capture portraits of people who we randomly meet on the street while the writer occupies themselves with extracting a narrative from the individual. We’re truthfully never certain who we’re going to meet and in the instances where we’ve encounter people who have had such a fascinating story and English is not their first language, I’ve converse with them and subsequentely translated their anecdotes to English.

Harlem, New York

Carroll Garden, Brooklyn

Lower East Side, New York

Any opportunity I get, I enjoy writing about photo gigs I’ve gotten to be a part of because in the end nothing I do is a secret. As an avid photographer, as someone who doesn’t necessarily do this for a living, I have a desire to learn as much as I can about the business aspect of this industry and to pretend that I’m a pro and that I know everything because that’s how it may seem from an outside perspective would be false.

TimeOut New York Photo Editor has been amazing in providing me with a PDF of every photograph that ends up being published on the magazine which I of course I've been saving. I've compiled together the photographs that have been published thus far right alongside the one I took and I must say that because all of this is relatively knew to me, it still feels surreal seeing week after week one of my photographs on a magazine that I've consistently read in order to inform myself what exciting events are happening in New York.